


The Master Calls a Butterfly

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Tumblr Methadone [5]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Declarations Of Love, End of the World, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Hospitals, Injury Recovery, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 06:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7348381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I shouldn't have come. </p><p>He arrives at that particular point on this path with the heavy door to her hospital room closing almost silently behind him. </p>
            </blockquote>





	The Master Calls a Butterfly

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Set mid-Rise (4 x 1) 

 

What the caterpillar calls 

the end of the world 

the master calls a butterfly.

_— Richard Bach_

 

 

* * *

 

 

_I shouldn't have come._

He arrives at that particular point on this path with the heavy door to her hospital room closing almost silently behind him. 

It's a familiar point just beyond  _I shouldn't be here,_  a destination that lies right outside in the hallway, under the watchful gaze and sympathetic nods of the uniforms still posted. And there's  _I shouldn't go up_  on the street just below.  _I should turn around_  on the subway stairs. 

He's visited a lot of places in just the few blocks between home and here. Traveled a lot of unpleasant ground in the sixty-one or so hours since she was shot. The thirty-seven hours since she told him she'd call. 

But he's here now, and there's one more stop.

He scans the tiny room. There's little to see and too much at once. There's the gravity-defying TV wedged in the high-up corner.  There's one of those roll-away trays, empty now and he wonders about the plastic pitcher. The stack of wrapped cups and the bendy straw that are the stuff of TV hospital vigils.  There's a chair, sternly tucked out of the way. There's the bed, not quite shielded by the half-drawn curtain, and there's her. What he supposes must be her, though she hardly seems real. 

Her skin is grey, even in the low light over the bed. Even with red and green and blue and purple bleeding down from the monitors. She's tethered. Taped to this and that. Hooked and clipped and tagged and so alien to the woman he knows that for an instant, his hurt recedes. His anger, just for an instant, and he sees how she wouldn't want him here. How she wouldn't want anyone to see this facsimile and mistake it for her. 

 _I shouldn't stay,_ he tells himself, but he's already reaching for the chair. He's already setting it down as near to her as he dares.

 _I shouldn't stay,_  he tells himself again as he settles in.

* * *

 

"It's not even supposed to rain now." He's surprised by his own voice. Unnerved by the way it displaces air and rings off the metal railing of the bed, even though it's low. "Can you believe that?" 

He doesn't expect her to answer. She wouldn't know what he's talking about, even if she weren't asleep. Even she didn't have God knows what drugs slipping through her veins to beat back the tide of pain he can't even imagine. He doesn't expect any reaction from her, but he goes on.  Can't stop himself now any more than he'd been able to at any point along the long way here. 

"High sixties at 6 pm local time. That's what they're predicting." He shakes his head. Almost laughs at himself. At everything. Almost. "What kind of apocalypse is that?"

He's tired all of a sudden. Wearier than he's felt in sixty-one hours, face plant on a borrowed precinct desk notwithstanding. His head dips. His watch face blurs in and out of intelligibility. 

 _Sixty-two hours,_  he thinks as the hands glide past midnight.  _Thirty-eight. Eighteen left._

His head fills with numbers. With panic and the things he held on to. The things he holds on to now, because the world might end after all.  

_Eight-two over fifty_

_ETA six_

_Labored_

_Respiration forty_

_Charging_

_Clear_

_Got her. Got her back._

“I should go,” he says suddenly. It’s truer out loud. More convincing with this facsimile of her anchored to the world like this. “You asked me to go, and it’s not even supposed to rain, but Beckett . . .” 

The ambient noise rearranges itself, exactly coincident with her name on his lips. The whoosh of the blood pressure cuff inflating. Tightening around the impossible thinness of her arm, but she doesn’t stir. Not at that, not at the symphony of monitors resuming, a fresh set of numbers displayed as if they hold new meaning. She doesn’t stir. 

“The world isn’t ending. I know that,” he adds sharply, as though she’s spoken. As though she’s given him a look, but she hasn’t. Her face—what he can see of it, half turned toward the tiny window—is as slack and immobile as the rest of her. “I know that.” 

He stares down at his fingers and wonders when they curled around the railing of the bed. Where they found the boldness to approach so closely that the backs of his nails bunch up the sleeve of her gown when he shifts. 

“But if it does . . .” 

His voice stalls on him, just shy of the lie, because it has nothing to do with the end of the world. Coming here, being here, staying here. It’s got nothing to do with the end of the world, any more than it had anything to do with her dying. 

“I don’t know if you heard me.” One hand unwraps itself from the freezing cold metal. It hovers well shy of the tip of her ear peeking through her lank hair. Well shy of her temple and the dark fringe of lashes resting on her cheek. “If you  _could_  hear or wanted to or . . . what it even means to hear something if you don’t remember.” 

He curls in on himself at the thought, fists crashing into his own chest now. Her voice echoes in his head. 

_. . . some things that are better not . . ._

It hurts in too many different ways. It spurs him to anger. To action. To speak. 

“I love you.” He lifts his eyes to her. To the fraction of profile he can see with her face half turned toward the tiny window. “Whether the world is ending or you’re dying or you remember or not.” He swallows past another hard truth. “I love you, whether you want me to or not, Kate.” 

He rises, then. He doesn’t let himself linger. He turns and goes, too swiftly—too entirely—to see her eyes flicker open. To see her watch him go.

 

* * *

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: 1000 words expended on a stupid idea. I was struck by the fact that the world, according to Harold Camping, anyway, was supposed to end May 21, 2011, shortly after Beckett’s shooting.


End file.
